There's never been a question on the advantages of open source software. Crowdsourcing, vendor independence, ability to see and in some cases control the source code, and lower costs are just a few benefits of open source software (OSS) and business model. Linux and Apache Hadoop are prime examples of successful OSS projects. It's a different story, however, when it comes to OSS BI. For years, OSS BI vendors struggled with growth because of:

The developer-centric nature of open source projects. The target audience for open source projects is developers, which means deals are mostly sealed by technology management. The industry, on the other hand, has gravitated toward business decision-makers within organizations over the last several years. However, business users are less interested in the opportunities that a collaborative open source community offers, and more concerned about ease of use and quick setup. Indeed, Forrester's research constantly finds evidence correlating business ownership as one of the key success factors for effective BI initiatives.

The battle of trying to apply traditional waterfall software development life-cycle (SDLC) methodology and project management to Business Intelligence (BI) has already been fought — and largely lost. These approaches and best practices, which apply to most other enterprise applications, work well in some cases, as with very well-defined and stable BI capabilities like tax or regulatory reporting. Mission-critical, enterprise-grade BI apps can also have a reasonably long shelf life of a year or more. But these best practices do not work for the majority of BI strategies, where requirements change much faster than these traditional approaches can support; by the time a traditional BI application development team rolls out what it thought was a well-designed BI application, it's too late. As a result, BI pros need to move beyond earlier-generation BI support organizations to:

Focus on business outcomes, not just technologies. Earlier-generation BI programs lacked an "outputs first" mentality. Those projects employed bottom-up approaches that focused on the program and technology first, leaving clients without the proper outputs that they needed to manage the business. Organizations should use a top-down approach that defines key performance indicators, metrics, and measures that align with the business strategy. They must first stop and determine the population of information required to manage the business and then address technology and data needs.

Between 2012 and 2014, mobile BI adoption shot up: Forrester survey data shows that the percentage of technology decision-makers who make some BI applications available on mobile devices has nearly quadrupled, and the percentage who state that BI is delivered exclusively via mobile devices has risen from 1% in 2012 to 7% in 2014. While this clearly demonstrates that mobile BI is gaining traction, the actual mobile BI adoption picture is rather more nuanced. Our ongoing research and client interactions show that mobile BI adopters fall into three overall groups; some organizations

Really ‘get’ the transformational potential of mobile BI. They are the ones who understand that mobile BI is about much more than liberating reports and dashboards from the desktop. They focus on how data can be leveraged to best effect when in the hands of the right person at the right time. If necessary, they’re prepared to change their business processes accordingly. For those companies, mobile BI is an enabler of strategic goals, and deployment is a journey, not an end in itself.

Make mobile BI available because it’s the right thing to do, or they’ve been asked to. Many of these organizations are reaping considerable benefits from their mobile BI implementations, and the more far-sighted of them are working on how to move from the tactical to the strategic. Equally, many are trying to figure out where to go from here, in particular if the initial deployment doesn't show a clear benefit, let alone return on investment.

To compete in today's global economy, businesses and governments need agility and the ability to adapt quickly to change. And what about internal adoption to roll out enterprise-grade Business Intelligence (BI) applications? BI change is ongoing; often, many things change concurrently. One element that too often takes a back seat is the impact of changes on the organization's people. Prosci, an independent research company focused on organizational change management (OCM), has developed benchmarks that propose five areas in which change management needs to do better. They all involve the people side of change: better engage the sponsor; begin organizational change management early in the change process; get employees engaged in change activities; secure sufficient personnel resources; and better communicate with employees. Because BI is not a single application — and often not even a single platform — we recommend adding a sixth area: visibility into BI usage and performance management of BI itself, aka BI on BI. Forrester recommends keeping these six areas top of mind as your organization prepares for any kind of change.

Some strategic business events, like mergers, are high-risk initiatives involving major changes over two or more years; others, such as restructuring, must be implemented in six months. In the case of BI, some changes might need to happen within a few weeks or even days. All changes will lead to either achieving or failing to achieve a business. There are seven major categories of business and organizational change:

Forrester recently published its 2015 Predictions for Asia Pacific. I wanted to highlight some specific trends around customer insights (CI) and big data, two very hot topics for many AP-based organizations.

We strongly believe that success for many organizations hinges on your ability to close the gap between available data and actionable insight. Marketing is taking the lead here, as CI pros seek to use data to fuel customer engagement improvements. Hence 2015 will be a year of increased fragmentation as reliance on analytics spreads across organizations.

What will this mean for you? More cloud-based and mobile analytics, more demand for interactive and responsive analytics, and more use of specialist and niche BI and analytics service providers. Given this backdrop, Forrester believes that:

Analytics spending will increase by at least 10% across the region. Yes analytics spending will increase, but less of it will be visible in the CIO's budget. Marketing and other business departments will drive analytics investments to address specific challenges and opportunities. The technology management (TM) organization will have little control over the implementation and deployment of niche and specialist BI and analytics services.

At the same time, for business leaders, having access to quality network infrastructure represents a vital underpinning for their digital business and their long-term competitive advantage. We predict that by 2015 and beyond:

The telco business model will shift from sustaining to enabling critical infrastructure. Traditionally, the telco business model focused on sustaining operational efficiency of network infrastructure. In the years ahead, we predict a shift toward enabling solutions that support telco clients to engage with their customers more effectively. This mirrors not only the CIO’s shift from IT towards business technology but will also be the overarching theme during the transformation of the telco business model.

An inquiry call from a digital strategy agency advising a client of theirs on data commercialization generated a lively discussion on strategies for taking data to market. With few best practices out there, the emerging opportunity just might feel like space exploration – going boldly where no man has gone before. The question is increasingly common. "We know we have data that would be of use to others but how do we know? And, which use cases should we pursue?" In It's Time To Take Your Data To Market published earlier this fall, my colleagues and I provided some guideance on identifying and commercializing that "Picasso in the attic." But the ideas around how to go-to-market continue to evolve.

In answer to the inquiry questions asked the other day, my advice was pretty simple: Don’t try to anticipate all possible uses of the data. Get started by making selected data sets available for people to play with, see what it can do, and talk about it to spread the word. However, there are some specific use cases that can kick-start the process.

Look to your existing customers.

The grass is not always greener, and your existing clients might just provide some fertile ground. A couple thoughts on ways your existing customers could use new data sources:

Digitally empowered customers — both businesses and consumers — wield a huge influence on enterprise strategies, policies, and customer-facing and internal processes. With mobile devices, the Internet, and all-but-unlimited access to information about products, services, prices, and deals, customers are now well informed about companies and their products, and are able to quickly find alternatives and use peer pressure to drive change. But not all organizations have readily embraced this new paradigm shift, desperately clinging to rigid policies and inflexible business processes. A common thread running through the profile of most of the companies that are not succeeding in this new day and age is an inability to manage change successfully. Business agility — reacting to fast-changing business needs — is what enables businesses to thrive amid ever-accelerating market changes and dynamics.

There just might be another 800-lb gorilla in the Business Intelligence market. In a year.

The popular cult book “Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy” by Douglas Adams defines space as “. . . big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. . .” There are no better words to describe the size and the opportunity of the business intelligence market. Not only is it “mind-bogglingly big,” but over the last few decades we’ve only scratched the surface. Recent Forrester research shows that only 12% of global enterprise business and technology decision-makers are sure of their ability to transform and use information for better insights and decision making, and over half still have BI and analytics content sitting in siloed desktop-based shadow IT applications that are mostly based on spreadsheets.

The opportunity has provided fertile feeding ground to more than fifty vendors, including: full-stack software vendors like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP, each with $1 billion-plus BI portfolios; SAS Institute, a multibillion BI and analytics specialist; popular BI vendors Actuate, Information Builders, MicroStrategy, Qlik, Tableau Software, and Tibco Software, each with hundreds of millions in BI revenues; as well as dozens of vendors ranging from early to late stage startups.

Unified information architecture, data governance, and standard enterprise BI platforms are all but a journey via a long and winding road. Even if one deploys the "latest and greatest" BI tools and best practices, the organization may not be getting any closer to the light at the end of the tunnel because:

Technology-driven enterprise BI is scalable but not agile. For the last decade, top down data governance, centralization of BI support on standardized infrastructure, scalability, robustness, support for mission critical applications, minimizing operational risk, and drive toward absolute single version of the truth — the good of enterprise BI — were the strategies that allowed organizations to reap multiple business benefits. However, today's business outlook is much different and one cannot pretend to put new wine into old wine skins. If these were the only best practices, why is it that Forrester research constantly finds that homegrown or shadow BI applications by far outstrip applications created on enterprise BI platforms? Our research often uncovers that — here's where the bad part comes in — enterprise BI environments are complex, inflexible, and slow to react and, therefore, are largely ineffective in the age of the customer. More specifically, our clients cite that the their enterprise BI applications do not have all of the data they need, do not have the right data models to support all of the latest use cases, take too long, and are too complex to use. These are just some of the reasons Forrester's latest survey indicated that approximately 63% of business decision-makers are using an equal amount or more of homegrown versus enterprise BI applications. And an astonishingly miniscule 2% of business decision-makers reported using solely enterprise BI applications.